The red rays km 041, p.1
The Red Rays (KM 041), page 1
part #41 of Killmaster Series
The Red Rays (1969)
(The 41st book in the Killmaster series)
Version 0.9
Dedicated to The Men of the Secret Services of the United States of America
Chapter 1
I was dreaming about the first man I ever killed.
His name was Serge something or other, and I killed him in an alley in Istanbul. With a knife—I hadn’t started using the stiletto yet—and I wasn’t much good with a knife. It was messy.
I dream in color, a fact which seems to mean something to Dr. Dorian Saxe, the AXE headshrinker, but doesn’t mean a damned thing to me except that the blood is redder and stickier on my hands.
The dream was recurrent, like reading the same book over and over, and now, this early morning in Beirut, in the air-conditioned Hotel Phoenecia, I didn’t feel much like going back to bed and the dream. Kezia Newmann, who thought that I thought she was an Israeli agent, was sleeping on her back. Kezia was in her late thirties, still very pretty, and as I stood by the bed watching her sleep I wondered just how much longer she had to live. My guess was not long.
Kezia worked for Shin Bet, all right, but she was also doubling for KGB. Or maybe GRU. No matter. Same firm. AXE had known about her for some time—I think it was Hawk who tipped Shin Bet—and the Israelis were giving her rope and letting her borrow a little time. As I watched her sleep, breathing evenly, with those magnificent breasts rising and falling, I knew I was looking at a woman already dead. Sort of a shame, too, because Kezia was a beautiful gal who went to bed because she liked it, and not just in the line of duty, and knew what to do once she was in bed. I’m not much for introspection—in my line of work it doesn’t pay—and no one has ever called me an intellectual, but for just a moment I was tempted to wake the girl and tell her she was well blown and so give her a chance to run for it. But I knew I wouldn’t. It was too complicated. There was no place for her to hide. As a blown agent she was no good to the Russians, and Shin Bet would get her sooner or later. Along the way, while she was running, she would inevitably involve a lot of other people and get some of them killed. Maybe even me.
I had no business playing around with her anyway. David Hawk, my august and not too even-tempered boss, would turn blue if he knew. But what Hawk didn’t know couldn’t hurt Hawk, or AXE, and if I do screwy things now and then—and I do—at least I always know the consequences—and how to avoid them.
I’d come across the line from Syria three days ago, dirty, beat up, and with a few scratches, having just finished a little job in Damascus. After reporting back to Washington, getting cleaned up and drawing some money, I checked in at the Hotel Phoenecia. That night I went to the Casino just outside of town, lost a few Lebanese pounds and picked up Kezia Newmann. She was pretty well blistered on arak—another reason she was going to die soon—and we went back to the hotel and shortly after her first orgasm she let me know she was an Israeli agent. Christ only knows why! Maybe because she was loaded, maybe to impress me, maybe because she just didn’t give a damn anymore.
I was traveling as Silas Lapham, a tobacco buyer out of New Orleans, and getting away with it. I cooked up the phony papers myself and now, as I stared down at Kezia, I remembered Hawk snorting and muttering something about some agents being too literate for their own good. Whatever that meant.
Anyway, Kezia had accepted me as Silas Lapham, tobacco buyer and amiable drunk—I am very good at playing the drunk bit—and seemed, to like me. We stayed close to the hotel and mainly the bed.
I enjoyed myself. When I come off a mission still alive, I like a little booze and a lot of fleshly sin. Sometimes I stick to one woman, sometimes I hop around a little, but the fact is that I usually spend a week indulging myself—what Hawk’s generation alluded to as making whoopee—then I cool off and, when I can, spend another week on the farm in Indiana. There I read, and rest, and start getting in shape for the next mission.
There was half a bottle of arak on the table. I had a nip and lit a cigarette and went back to look at the sleeping girl. Sneaky, you know. A sleeping person, man or woman, is so damned defenseless. So easy to kill.
It was only in symbol that I decided to kill Kezia now. There is some of the sadist in me, or I wouldn’t be an agent, and as I smoked my cigarette and sipped the arak—not a favorite drink of mine, but she liked it—and watched her sleep and felt the pleasant ache and tension I knew that pretty soon I was going to make love to her and she would wake and that I would in a way, for the moment be welded into her, be one with her and sharing her fate.
But then we would diverge and her death would not be my death. I think that if in that moment I could really, really have saved her I would have tried to help her. But it was impossible. I couldn’t help Kezia Newmann. Nobody could.
As I pulled down the sheet and gently slipped in next to her, easy and not waking her, I glanced at the little gold clock on the mantel. Courtesy of the management. It was a quarter of five.
Kezia was waking up. “My God,” she said. “My God! My God—what are you doing to me?”
I quoted Ecclesiastes. “There is a time for everything, baby, and everything in its time. Shut up.”
She didn’t even hear me.
“Yes,” she said. “Oh, yes. Ohhhh—yes.”
Kezia bit me on the shoulder. Hard. “You’ve got to stop now,” she moaned. “You really must, Sy. I can’t stand it! You’re a maniac. You’re killing me. Stop it. Stop it!”
When I picked Kezia up at the Casino she had what you might call a pseudo-cultured accent. Her English was good—should be, since she was born in Brooklyn, on Flatbush near Grand Army Plaza, and hadn’t moved to Israel until she was fifteen—but in bed she lapsed back into Brooklynese. Not words, just accent.
When I didn’t stop she started to cry, really on the verge of hysterics now, and stopped moving under me. Her eyes rolled back in her head, with a lot of the white showing. I kept going.
Afterwards neither of us could move for a long time. I lay with my face buried in Kezia’s pillow-breasts and began the usual struggle against lethargy and regret, against the calm hopelessness, the PCT—post-coming triste—that saps a man and makes him wonder if anything in the whole lousy world is worth the effort.
I doubt it effects women the same way. I’ve never been able to find out.
Kezia ran her fingers through my hair—my own now, because I’d gotten rid of the hairpiece I wore in Syria—and said, “You are a monster, darling. A monster!”
Her accent was pure Flatbush. She went on: “I have never in all my life had anything like that! Sweet Christ!”
I admitted modestly that I was pretty good.
Kezia stared up at me with narrowed eyes. “Good? My God—you are tremendous, man! Honestly, Sy, I never believed it could be like that. Honestly. My God—you must have to beat them off with clubs.”
I was coming back now. I thought of the Luger and stiletto in the false bottom of my suitcase and remembered that I hadn’t cleaned the Lugar yet. Careless of me. I would get to it first thing—as soon as I extricated myself from this pleasant little net of flesh I had woven, and that was now beginning to be something of a bore.
I waited for the phone to ring. Nothing. No knock on the door. Yet. But I still had the hunch. I knew.
When I finally summoned enough strength to roll out of bed, Kezia caught at me and gave me a little kiss and a squeeze. “You take good care of that, Sy. I’ve come to love him. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to him.”
“Nor I,” I told her as I went into the bathroom. “Nor I.”
I was out of the shower and toweling when the knock came on the door. Kezia was asleep again and I tried not to wake her.
In my business you don’t just throw doors wide open and greet people with wide spread arms. I whispered, “Who is it?”
“Cablegram for Mista Silas Lapham.” The English was slurred by a genuine Lebanese accent.
I opened the door. “I’m Mr. Lapham.”
I gave the boy some coins and he handed me the buff envelope. It had to be from Hawk. He and Delia Stokes, his confidential secretary, were the only people who knew where I was—and who I really was.
The boy didn’t leave at once. He was a pert little character with a sort of smart-aleck grin, and he kept looking past me into the room. They grow up fast along the Levant and I figured that the kid was looking at the sleeping Kezia—I only had a room, not a suite—and getting some juvenile kicks and thinking bad thoughts. I didn’t want to be a party to inflaming his minor’s imagination and have him ending up in the basement practicing the secret sin, so I gave him a gentle shove.
“Okay, kid. Thanks. Out.”
He lingered, still staring into the room past me, and I saw that he was looking at the TV set and not at the bed.
“Your TV not work okay either, mista?”
I must have looked as baffled as I was, because he went on to say: “All TV, all over world, is gone to hell, mista. You not knowing?”
I shrugged and steered him firmly out the door. “I am not knowing. Now beat it.”
He beat it. I closed the door and took the cable into the bathroom, wondering what in hell that had been about. All TV all over the world is gone, to hell?
My first inclination was to give three rousing cheers and draft a letter of congratulation to whoever, or whatever, had succeeded in bolluxing up TV all over the world. I am not much of a devotee of the boob tube. Hawk is, though he will never admit it.
To hell with it. I hadn’t looked a t TV for weeks. I hadn’t read a newspaper in three days. With Kezia around I am going to read or look at the idiot box?
The cablegram read: Model T Woof-Woof-First-Musty—
There was no signature. There didn’t have to be. It was from Hawk—who else?—and it meant that the firm was back in business again, right now and without delay.
Over the years, working in such close liaison, Hawk and I have evolved our own personal code. Not to be found in the official code books. I never carry a code book anyway, because that is asking for trouble.
I doubt that another Killmaster—there are three others, as I happen to know (Hawk doesn’t know I know)— I doubt that he could have decoded the cable. I did it without conscious thought as I started to shave.
Model was nothing—a makeweight word inserted to balance and deceive. T Woof, the second woof being superfluous, meant Thomas Wolfe. The novelist. First meant Wolfe’s first book.
Thomas Wolfe’s first novel was Look Homeward, Angel.
Musty meant urgent, now, at once, do it yesterday. An old newspaper term.
Hawk wanted me in Los Angeles right away.
Kezia was sleeping like an exhausted baby as. I gumshoed around and collected my few things. I always travel as light as possible. I don’t need much in my line of work: the Luger, a few spare clips, the stiletto in the arm sheath, sometimes a few bits and pieces of disguise such as hair, spirit gum, padding and contact lens, things like that. Mainly I rely on “natural” disguise—the way I walk and talk and carry myself—and only on rare occasions do I resort to the rubber and plastic gimmicks. I don’t need them. Along with being a highly trained and efficient assassin I’m a natural mime. It comes in handy.
Kezia didn’t wake up. I left a stack of money on the dresser and avoided looking at her as I closed and locked the door behind me. That was over. Forget it. I knew I was right about her, and would have bet a thousand dollars against a Lebanese pound, about thirty-three cents, that I would never see her alive again. But as I walked down the corridor to the elevator I admitted to a creepy feeling. It was as though I had just made love to a beautiful, and animated, corpse. Soon to be. I did have a creepy feeling. Necrophilia is not my bag.
I spotted him as I waited for a taxi to take me out to the airport. I have a good memory—not total recall, not a photo mind, or. anything like that—but good. I’ve trained it. And two or three times a year I spend a week going through the AXE files in Washington.
He was lounging about in the parking lot over the way and making conversation with the attendant. A big man in one of those drab and badly cut suits they always wear. His name was Nikolay Tovaretz and he was a sub case officer, an underling for the rezident on the Beirut rezidentura. I didn’t know who was the top KGB man in Beirut at the moment, but I knew Tovaretz. He was a killer. Mostly with his hands, as I remembered the file, and mostly women. I had grabbed a stack of newspapers on the way through the lobby, but now I ignored the screaming headlines and watched Tovaretz. He did have big hands.
His glance slid past me without interest. I was wearing my Silas Lapham suit, my horn rims, my stoop and corn-fed half-drunken manner. I knew there would be no bars open this early, so before I left the room I had a couple of araks to get the smell on my breath. It was only a few minutes after seven and I was already half blasted.
My taxi came and I piled in. So they were watching Kezia Newmann around the clock. I wondered for how long, then forgot it. There was no way of knowing. They hadn’t spotted me or I wouldn’t be riding to the airport now.
There was nothing I could do. Absolutely nothing. I knew that I had been lucky again—luck usually runs with me—and that my timing had been just right. Hawk’s cable had come at the right time. I had cut out, alone, at just the right time. If I had hung around a few more hours, taken Kezia out to lunch, or dinner, or remained to do some more screwing, I could well have ended up in a hell of a mess. Another one of those by-the-skin-of-the-teeth things and I took enormous pleasure in thinking about it.
I still hadn’t read the Paris edition of The New York Times when we got to the airport. I was flying TWA and I made it with a minute and a half to spare. I rolled the papers into a bundle on my lap and as the plane climbed and banked, watched the snow glint on the Dar-el-Beider mountains to the northeast. The blunt peaks grew larger and I realized that the plane was going to make a sweep over Baalbek. It was a tourist thing, a sometimes courtesy gesture, in the hope that you would forget about delayed flights, air conditioning that didn’t work, and burned steaks. I had seen Baalbek. In fact, I had had Baalbek. The closest I ever came to being killed in the line of duty was one night in the temple of Jupiter. I opened the roll of papers.
The kid had been so right Somebody—and no one seemed to know exactly who—was raising hell with TV all over the world.
The kid had said: “All TV, all over world, is gone to hell, mista.”
The Times, that good gray lady, was a bit more restrained. They hadn’t broken out the end-of-the-world type, and the head was only four-column, but excitement was there.
MASSIVE BLACKOUT OF WORLD TV;
ALL CHANNELS INTERDICTED BY RED
PROPAGANDA. PRESIDENT URGES CALM
Scientists Suspect Lasers But Decry
Outer Space As Source; Billions Lost;
Baffled UN Takes Emergency Measures
I read the lead in the story. Somewhere, in the world a powerful TV transmitter was blanking out all other programs and superimposing its own. The Chicoms were doing it. They admitted it, but with a difference. These were new Chinese Reds. They were dedicated to the extinction of the old order of Reds in China. They called themselves Neo-Coms. New Communists.
The Neo-Coms were not transmitting from China. The location of their transmitter was their secret and they weren’t telling. Yet. But they would tell, in time. When Mao was out and they were in—and when the Chinese, the Neo-Com Chinese, were admitted to the United Nations and all was cozy and comfy and everybody was buddy-buddy.
All in good time. The world would see the light. Meantime the secret TV transmitter would continue to dominate all channels, whenever they wished, and you either watched and listened to the Neo-Com line or you turned off the boob box and forgot it.
The beautiful part, the gorgeous gimmick, from their viewpoint, was that the Neo-Coms were using our satellites, and the Russians’, to bounce their laser rays, or masers, or whatever, around the world. There was no way of tracing the home transmitter. It might be at the North Pole, in Timbuctoo, or just outside Gnawbone, Indiana.
I skimmed the stories, smoking cigarettes at a great pace, and kept my eyes off the blonde stewardess in the mini-uniform. At the moment I had no great interest in legs and fannies, no matter how spectacular. I was back in business, working again, even though I had not seen Hawk. Los Angeles is the television capital of the United States. I expected that Hawk would meet me there. He would have orders for me. QED. I was in it.
I couldn’t, at the moment, see the AXE angle, where we fitted in, but I didn’t let that bother me. This was a political setup, never mind new or old Chicoms, and the TV bit was nothing but blackmail.
AXE would fit in somewhere. And AXE would get the dirty job, as always. Me. Killmaster.
I dropped the papers and relaxed, smoking. The thing had its humorous angles. The ratings, for one thing, were pretty good among males the world over. When they could sneak a look. The Neo-Coms were staging some pretty hot stag shows on the miniature screen.
And no commercials!
There was the propaganda, of course, but nothing is perfect. I found myself chuckling and the old biddy across the aisle looked at me with suspicion. I gave her my best smile and winked. She stuck her nose in the air and sniffed.
The stewardess bent over me, tender and solicitous, inquiring if I wished a drink and permitting me a glimpse of a pink bra. I thought of Kezia for a moment and wished I hadn’t.
I decided to sleep a little. Planes always make me drowsy. As I drifted into the mist I wondered if Tovaretz would screw Kezia before he strangled her. Sometimes the Russian muscle boys play that way.
Chapter 2
From Kennedy Airport I taxied to the penthouse on East 46th Street. I needed a change of suits and some clean shirts. Silas Lapham was dead now, again, and I hoped W. D. Howells wasn’t spinning too hard in his grave. The square suit could go to the Salvation Army, though I doubted there would be any takers even there.
